Small-town smug

The insatiable public fascination with Nicole Kidman was handsomely served at the film festival this weekend. The actress could be seen in a dog collar and chain as the slave and sex toy of an entire American town in Danish director Lars von Trier's Dogville; then, in Robert Benton's The Human Stain, as an illiterate caretaker with a sexually abusive stepfather, a violent husband, two dead children and a septuagenarian lover. Coming hard on the heels of her suicidal Virginia Woolf in The Hours, Kidman's recent gloomy choice of roles does make you start to worry about her.

Set during the Monica Lewinsky scandal of 1998 - "the summer of sanctimony" - The Human Stain is based on Philip Roth's novel about a distinguished university professor fired on trumped-up charges of political incorrectness. His wife dies, his colleagues shrug him off and he plunges himself into a Viagra-fuelled affair with another lost soul, a cleaner four decades his junior.

Benton has a fine track record for his work with actors, but here the casting lets him down. Gorgeous and pouting, Kidman is too flagrantly foxy for the character; maybe a false nose might have helped. Hopkins looks nothing like the light-skinned African-American he is meant, incredibly, to be - or, indeed, like the excellent Wentworth Miller who plays him as an angry young man.

Von Trier has been attacked for Dogville's supposed anti-Americanism, but The Human Stain offers an equally withering view of small-town smugness and hypocrisy. It is a decent, intelligent film that yet somehow fails to excite. One scene brings a touch of brio: Hopkins and Gary Sinise - playing a reclusive writer - hoofing happily together to the strains of Fred Astaire's Cheek To Cheek. But the rest could do with a dash of Viagra - or, perhaps, of dark Danish madness.